What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
-
Hello,
I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display.In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products.
The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up).
What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct?---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO ---------
The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...)
Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination).
Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two.
Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product.
The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012...
Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar.
Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's?
Thanks
-
Creating 301 to non-existing products is easy (technically speaking) - are you sure that it not considered a bad thing by Google? (pages keep being removed).
Thanks again
-
301 it to the most appropriate substitute. I think it'll be easier to manage your redirect list than to juggle so many pages. You should see the impact in analytics, especially if you are tracking eCom and/or goals. Bounce rates will probably come down and time on page go up. Good luck on this.
-
Dear Chas,
You are actually correct - Google often sends people to the sold items pages and while I assumed that they will look for a similar product - they actually bounce! This is why I thought that if I will add a one way link from a sold Item to an available item Google will direct them to the available item.
About redirection - I can do that but it will be lots of redirections - products are rapidly changing.
Maybe I really should simply remove a product completely when it is sold (make it unreachable from the website - no links to it at all) and have a 301 on it and call it a day... What do you think?
-
True, if the more desirable goal is building page authority rather than selling product. "Sold out" or "out of stock" invites a bounce.
Both could be achieved with a link to a like product from the sold out page, but from a real world eCom standpoint asking product maintenance staff to insert contextual links in product copy is to invite errors or indifference - most platforms have a user friendly redirect mechanism.
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
see update on top. Thanks
-
Hi Chas,
If a product is likely to come back in the future, I'd strong suggest against redirecting the product at-all. Simply leave it to build authority whilst inactive but do display a message saying that it’s not available for purchase.
-
As SEOconsult noted, knowing a little more about the nature of your products would be helpful. I'll make an assumption that these products, while unique, have a relationship or similarity with other products you have. You could judiciously use 301 redirects (or possibly a 302 if you expect the non-existent item to eventually reappear). This is especially important if an item has acquired an external link. Eventual kill the 301 when the SEs have cleansed their index of it.
Situations like this are very common for eCom retailers - 2011 Fall Sweaters are no longer relevant (or available) - but for a good UX you'd want a searcher who found you (your sweaters) through a SERP to be redirected to a similar product (2012 Spring Sweaters).
Having a page of sold items may do you better service as a means of demonstrating credibility to potential customers as a trusted purveyor who has sold many items of XXXXXX. As for upsetting Google by removing indexed pages, quite the contrary - by removing pages and using redirects, you're telling Google come back frequently, this site is dynamic and changes often, therefore it is current and more relevant than a static, unchanging site.
-
Hi there,
Would you be able to give us an example URL (if you don't want to mention the URL in-case this page ranks for the site, perhaps you could link to a pastebin.com page containing a URL)?
Do the individual products have their own URL?
If so, I wouldn't worry about having a page for "sold items", unless of-course that's the only section of the site that mentions the said products.
Without looking at the site, I'd expect there to be categories within the site and within the categories there would be products and each product would have it's own individual page. If that's the case, there should be no need for a page listing "sold items". I'd suggest that the sold items are kept within the category that they're meant for so that they're still linked to internally; perhaps at the bottom so that the active products are at the top and the inactive are at the bottom?
If you could explain how the site works a little further (or provide a URL, I'll be able to give you a more relevant answer).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I even do product page schema?
If I have no reviews/ratings on the page itself and special/limited time offers and just a regular product page with a standard price, is there any ability to do product schema with it getting flagged for errors? Google's Structured Markup Testing Tool threw me an error when I test it without any of those: | One of offers or review or aggregateRating should be provided. | And even if it's possible, is there any point?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan0 -
Author Credit when Using Existing Article
Hello, We have received permission from a consultant we partner with to publish one of his articles on our site (listing him as the author, of course). However, he currently has the article published on his site, so if I put it on my site will I get penalized for stealing content? Is there some sort of tagging that will provide him/his site credit? Maybe a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
No Index No follow instead of Rel canoncical on product pages
Hi all, we handle our product pages no with rel canonical now, we have 1 url that is indexed http://www.prams.net/cam-combi-family the other colours have different urls like http://www.prams.net/cam-combi-family-3-in-1-pram-reversible-seat-car-seat-grey-d which canonicalize to the indexed page. Google still crawls all those pages. For crawl budget reasons we want to use "no index, no follow" instead on these pages (the pages for the other colours)? Google would then crawl fewer pages more often? Does this make sense? Are their any downsides doing it? Thanks in advance Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco1 -
Ecommerce SEO: Shared content on product pages
Hi Guys, I am wondering what the best practices are for avoiding duplicate content on product pages that have shared content. For example, say I have a 3 different product pages for each of the following: Verizon IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 32GB. Obviously each product is for the most part the same (all are IPhone 5). The only differences lie in the carrier of the phone and the storage capacity. I want to write product descriptions for each page to target a variety of different keywords, but I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content. Does anybody have any experience in what the SEO best practices are for product pages that have shared content like this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Any arguments against eliminating all (non-blog) subfolders?
Short URLs seem to do the trick from a UX perspective. For example: /primary-care vs. /why/specialties/primary-care . This convention will be applied over 30-40 pages. Note that while "/why/specialties/primary-care" isn't terribly ugly, some of our pages would look a little overly-keywordy if we go with the subfolder approach.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NueMD0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Should I Remove My Articles From Article Directories?
I have been submitting articles to directories for about 3 years. With the Panda update, it seems that these directories are now obsolete. So, if there is no link value from these articles: 1) should I remove these articles (at east the better ones) and place them on my site/blog? 2) If not, would there be any benefit at pointing some bookmarks at these old links to maybe get some juice out of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0